Casey Seiler: Here's to the losers (you, me)

The Times Union's maiden attempt at political-corruption bracketology attracted more than 7,500 votes over the course of five rounds as last Sunday's list of 32 malefactors was winnowed down by readers' votes to a championship round between former gubernatorial aide Joe Percoco and ex-Assemblyman Steve McLaughlin.

Percoco, of course, was convicted March 13 of trading more than $300,000 in bribes for the official favors that flowed from the considerable influence he wielded as Gov. Andrew Cuomo's executive deputy secretary. McLaughlin, meanwhile, was exposed last year by the TU's Brendan J. Lyons using obscene and abusive language to berate his top legislative aide, and three months later was sanctioned by the Assembly for allegedly asking another lawmaker's aide for nude photos. McLaughlin, who at the time of his sanction was three weeks past his election as Rensselaer County executive, denies the latter behavior but has apologized for the former — because, you know, you can't really argue with raw audio.

In what might be described as a somewhat pyrrhic victory for the honor of upstate New York, Percoco won the championship in a landslide, 2,718 to 759. If anyone wants to design T-shirts around this, go right ahead.

As noted during last week's unveiling of the bracket, this competition was in no way scientific and should not be taken as the last word on who is the most corrupt public official in the state over the past decade and a half. I don't think the shabby treatment of women that McLaughlin has so far been sanctioned for or admitted to is as voluminous as that of his fellow Assembly alumni Dennis Gabryszak and Vito Lopez, though that's not the kind of endorsement likely to turn up on a bumper sticker if McLaughlin goes back before voters in 2021.

Nor do I think Percoco's crimes holds a candle to that of former state Sen. Pedro Espada Jr. of the Bronx, a truly world-class sleazebag who stole from his own Bronx health care nonprofit while leveraging his way to the title of Democratic majority leader. (And remember: Espada was one of four-count-'em-four Senate majority leaders on the initial bracket.)

As several observers have pointed out, Percoco's success in March Badness was likely due to what's known as "recency bias," which slants our perceptions in the direction of that which is most current. If the competition had been held in a few months, it's possible that Dean Skelos, Sheldon Silver, Alain Kaloyeros or any of the other public servants soon to face their own retrials or trials might have come out on top. And it's also likely that McLaughlin benefited from regional bias, as the Times Union is a Capital Region outlet and he is — to the chagrin of many — a homeboy.

If both of these things are true, these competing biases might have canceled each other out. Then again, respondents could vote as often as they wanted — one imagines competing teams of beleaguered Executive Chamber or Rensselaer County employees furiously hammering their keyboards voting for the opposing team's guy on Friday morning.

But before we close down the arena on March Badness, let's turn away from the candidates and remember the people who contributed to their work: those who stood by and did nothing, or at least not nearly enough.

In Percoco's case, that would be Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who apparently expects the people of New York to believe that he had no idea what the man he referred to as a brother was up to in the adjoining office. The day after the guilty verdict, the governor told reporters he "believed" Percoco was doing "transition work" over the course of the 68 days in 2014 when Percoco, who had left the Executive Chamber to manage Cuomo's campaign, was operating out of his old government office in Manhattan.

It's pretty hard to prove someone is lying when they're talking about what they believe, which I suspect is why Cuomo phrased it that way. The use of public resources by a campaign is a violation of Public Officers Law, and Percoco's 2014 behavior and Cuomo's knowledge of it might or might not be the subject of an investigation by the state Joint Commission on Public Ethics, which rarely misses a chance to demonstrate its toothlessness.

McLaughlin was aided by the beyond-sluggish deliberations of the Assembly's ethics committee, which spent 17 months investigating the nude-photos allegation against him — a period of time in which he launched his county executive campaign, abused his aide, won a Republican primary and then narrowly defeated his Democratic opponent. Few outside the star chamber of the Assembly leadership knew that he was under investigation. No one can say to a certainty that McLaughlin wouldn't be in his current office if those allegations had come out before election day, but you can definitely say that to a near-certainty.

So let's end this exercise with at least a glimmer of hope: Assemblywoman Aravella Simotas, D-Queens, was handed the unenviable job of chairing the ethics committee late last year, and has both the opportunity and the responsibility to effect changes that could speed the committee's pace to at least a lope.

I wish her well in these endeavors. The next time we build our bracket, it would be nice if the Capital Region didn't make it so far.